Amid the lifeless silence of the Void

In a solitude and an immensity

A sound came quivering like a loved footfall

Heard in the listening spaces of the soul;

A touch perturbed his fibres with delight.

An influence had approached the mortal range,

A boundless Heart was near his longing heart,

A mystic Form enveloped his earthly shape.

All at her contact broke from silence' seal;

Spirit and body thrilled identified,

Intoxicated as with nectarous rain

His nature's passioning stretches flowed to her

Flashing with lightnings, mad with luminous wine.

All was a limitless sea that heaved to the moon.

A divinising stream possessed his veins,

His body's cells awoke to spirit sense,

No soul is thy companion in the light,

Alone thou standest at the eternal doors.

What thou hast won is thine, but ask no more.

0 Spirit aspiring in an ignorant frame,

0 Voice arisen from the Inconscient's world,

How shalt thou speak for men whose hearts are dumb,

Make purblind earth the soul's seer-vision's home

Or lighten the burden of the senseless globe?

I am the Mystery beyond reach of mind,

But too immense my danger and my joy.

Awake not the immeasurable descent,

Truth born too soon might break the imperfect earth.

Helping the world with thy great lonely days.

I ask thee not to merge thy heart of flame

In the Immobile's wide uncaring bliss,

Turned from the fruitless motion of the years,

Deserting the fierce labour of the worlds,

Aloof from beings, lost in the Alone.

How shall thy mighty spirit brook repose

While Death is still unconquered on the earth

And Time a field of suffering and pain?

Arrived from some half-luminous Beyond

He is a stranger in the mindless vasts,

A traveller in his oft-shifting home

Amid the tread of many infinitudes,

He has pitched a tent 'of life in desert Space.

Heaven's fixed regard beholds him from above,

In the house, of Nature a perturbing guest,

A voyager twixt Thought's inconstant shores,

A hunter of unknown and beautiful Powers,

A nomad of the far mysterious Light,

In the wide ways a little spark of God.

Against his spirit all is in dire league,

A Titan influence stops his Godward gaze.

Around him hungers the unpitying Void,

The eternal Darkness seeks him with her hands,

Inscrutable Energies drive him and deceive,

Immense implacable deities oppose.

An inert Soul and a somnambulist Force

Have made a world estranged from life and thought,

The Dragon of the dark foundations keeps

The grey-hued riddling nether shadow-Sphinx,

Her dreadful paws upon the swallowing sands,

Assailed on earth and unassured of heaven,

Descended here unhappy and sublime,

A link between the demigod and the beast,

His mass is buried in the animal mire.

A strange antinomy is his nature's rule.

He has need of darkness to perceive some light

And need of grief to feel a little bliss,

He has need of death to find a greater life.

Always he builds, but finds no constant ground,

He fabricates signs of the Real in Ignorance.

He has hitched his mortal error to Truth's star.

Wisdom attracts him with her luminous masks,

Assigned to meet the cosmic mystery

In the dumb figure of a material world,

His passport of entry false and his personage,

And sinks in Matter to fulfil his soul.

Awakened from her lower driven forms

The Earth-Mother gave her forces to his hands

Illumining breath to think and plasm to feel,

He labours with his slow and sceptic brain

Helped by the reason's vacillating fires,

To make his thought and will a magic door

For knowledge to enter the darkness of the world

And tied to Matter with a thousand bonds,

He lifts himself to be a conscious god.

Even when a glory of wisdom crowns his brow,

When mind and spirit shed a grandiose ray

To exalt this product of the sperm and gene,

This alchemist's miracle from plasm and gas,

And he who shared the animal's run and crawl,

Lifts his thought-stature to the Immortal's heights,

Abandoning Matter, his too heavy charge.

A thaumaturge sceptic of miracles,

A spirit left sterile of its occult power

By an unbelieving brain and credulous heart

Thus has he missed creation's absolute.

An ill-served high conception doubtfully done,

The world's life falters on not seeing its goal,

A zigzag towards unknown dangerous ground

Ever repeating its habitual walk,

Ever retreating after marches long

And hardiest victories without sure result,

Drawn endlessly an inconclusive game.

In an ill-fitting and voluminous robe

A radiant purpose still conceals its face,

A mighty blindness stumbles hoping on

Feeding its strength on gifts of luminous Chance.

Because the human instrument has failed,

The Godhead frustrate sleeps within its seed,

A spirit entangled in the forms it made.

However man's mind may tire or fail his flesh,

A will prevails cancelling his conscious choice: .

The goal recedes, a bourneless vastness calls

A witness to God's parley with the Night

It leaned compassionate from immortal calm

And housed desire, the troubled seed of things.

Assent to thy high self, create, endure.

Cease not from knowledge, let thy toil be vast,

No more in earthly limits pen thy force,

Equal thy work with long unending Time's.

Traveller upon the bare eternal heights,

Tread still the difficult and dateless path

Joining the cycles with its austere curve

Measured for man by the initiate Gods.

My light shall be in thee, my strength thy force.

Let not the impatient Titan drive thy heart,

Ask not the imperfect fruit, the partial prize.

Above blind fate and the antagonist powers

All things shall change in God's transfiguring hour."

How long shall our spirits battle with the Night

And bear defeat and the brute yoke of Death,

We who are vessels of a deathless Force

And builders of the godhead of the race?

Or if it is thy work I do below

Amid the error and waste of human life

In the vague light of man's half-conscious mind,

Why breaks not in some distant gleam of thee?

Ever the centuries and millenniums pass.

Where in the greyness is thy coming's ray?

Where is the thunder of thy victory's wings?

Only we hear the feet of passing gods.

A plan in the occult eternal Mind

Mapped out to backward and prophetic sight,

The aeons ever repeat their changeless round,

The cycles all rebuild and ever aspire.

All we have done is ever still to do.

All breaks and all renews and is the same.

Huge revolutions of life's fruitless gyre,

The new-born ages perish like the old,

As if the sad Enigma kept its right

Till all is done for which this scene was made.

Too little the strength that now with us is born,

Too faint the light that steals through Nature's lids,

Too scant the joy with which she buys our pain.

In a brute world that knows not its own sense,

Thought-racked upon the wheel of birth we live,

The instruments of an impulse not our own

Moved to achieve with our heart's blood for price

Half-knowledge, half-creations that soon tire.

A foiled immortal soul in perishing limbs,

In anguish we labour that from us may rise

A larger-seeing man with nobler heart,

A golden vessel of the incarnate Truth,

The executor of the divine attempt

Equipped to wear the earthly body of God,

This strange irrational product of the mire,

This compromise between the beast and God,

Is not the crown of thy miraculous world.

I know there shall inform the inconscient cells,

At one with Nature and at height with heaven,

A spirit vast as the containing sky

And swept with ecstasy from invisible founts,

A god come down and greater by the fall.

A power arose out of my slumber's cell.

Abandoning the tardy limp of the hours

And the inconstant blink of mortal sight,

There where the Thinker sleeps in too much light

And intolerant flames the lone all-witnessing Eye

Hearing the word of Fate from Silence' heart

In the endless moment of Eternity,

It saw from timelessness the works of Time.

Overpassed were the leaden formulas of the Mind,

A giant dance of Shiva tore the past,

Alarm and rumour shook the armoured Night.

I saw the Omnipotent's flaming pioneers

Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life

Into the little room of mortal life.

I saw them cross the twilight of an age,

The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn,

The great creators with wide brows of calm,

The massive barrier-breakers of the world

And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will,

The labourers in the quarries of the gods,

The messengers of the Incommunicable,

The architects of immortality.

Into the fallen human sphere they came,

Faces that wore the Immortal's glory still,

Voices that communed still with the thoughts of God,

Bodies made beautiful by the Spirit's light,

Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,

Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy,

Approaching eyes of a diviner man,

Lips chanting an unknown anthem of the soul,

Feet echoing in the corridors of Time.

High priests of wisdom, sweetness, might and bliss,

Discoverers of beauty's sunlit ways

And swimmers of Love's laughing fiery floods

And dancers within rapture's golden doors,

Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth

And justify the light on Nature's face.

Although Fate lingers in the high Beyond

And the work seems vain on which our heart's force was spent,

All shall be done for which our pain was borne.

Even as of old man came behind the beast

This high divine successor surely shall come

Behind man's inefficient mortal pace, 1

He shall do what the heart of the mortal could not dare.

Inheritor of the toil of human time

Heavy, and long are the years our labour counts

And still the seals are firm upon man's soul

And weary is the ancient Mother's heart.

0 Truth defended in thy secret sun,

Voice of her mighty musings in shut heavens

On things withdrawn within her luminous depths,

0 Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the universe,

Creatrix, the Etemal's artist Bride,

Linger not long with thy transmuting hand

Pressed vainly on one golden bar of Time,

As if Time dare not open its heart to God.

0 radiant fountain of the world's delight

World-free and unattainable above,

0 Bliss who ever dwellst deep hid within

While men seek thee outside and never find,

Mystery and Muse with hieratic tongue,

Incarnate the white passion of thy force,

Mission to earth some living form of thee.

One moment fill with thy eternity,

Let thy infinity in one body live,

All-Knowledge wrap one mind in seas of light,

All-Love throb single in one human heart.

Immortal, treading the earth with mortal feet

All heaven's beauty crowd in earthly limbs!

Omnipotence, girdle with the power of God

Movements and moments of a mortal will,

Pack with the eternal might one human hour

And with one gesture change all future time.

Let a great word be spoken from the heights

And one great act unlock the doors of Fate."

Oppressed by the thousand forces that deny,

As if too weak to climb to the Supreme.

One shall descend and break the iron Law,

Change Nature's doom by the lone Spirit's power.

A limitless Mind that can contain the world,

A sweet and violent heart of ardent calms

Moved by the passions of the gods shall come.

Delight shall sleep in the cloud-net of her hair

And in her body as on his homing tree

Immortal Love shall beat his glorious wings.

The streams of Heaven shall murmur in her laugh,

Her lips shall be the honeycombs of God,

Her limbs his golden jars of ecstasy,

Her breasts the rapture-flowers of Paradise.

She shall bear Wisdom in her voiceless bosom,

Strength shall be with her like a conqueror's sword

And from her eyes the Eternal's bliss shall gaze.

A seed shall be sown in Death's tremendous hour,

Indifferent, waste, a desert of bright peace.

A quick and many-murmured moan and laugh, .

Came gliding in upon white feet of sound.

Surrendered to the breath of mortal air,

Dissolving boundlessly the heavens of trance

Collapsed to waking mind. Eternity

Cast down its incommunicable lids

Over its solitudes remote from ken

Behind the voiceless mystery of sleep.

The grandiose respite failed; the wide release.

Across the light of fast-receding planes

That fled from him as from a falling star

Compelled to fill his human house in Time

His soul drew back into the speed and noise

Of the vast business of created things.

A chariot of the marvels of the heavens

Broad-based to bear the gods on fiery wheels,

Flaming he swept through the spiritual gates.

The mortal stir received him in its midst.

Once more he moved amid material scenes,

Lifted by intimations from the heights

And twixt the pauses of the building brain

Touched by the thoughts that skim the fathomless surge

Of Nature and wing back to hidden shores.

The eternal seeker in the aeonic field

Besieged by the intolerant press of hours

Again was strong for great swift-footed deeds.

Awake beneath the ignorant vault of Night,

He saw the unnumbered people of the stars

And heard the questioning of the unsatisfied flood

And toiled with the form-maker, measuring Mind.

A wanderer from the occult invisible suns

Accomplishing the fate of transient tilings,

A god in the figure of the arisen beast,

He raised his brow of conquest to the heavens

In the scant field of the ambiguous globe.